The real when closely observed becomes magical.

Another Glacier Park Novel

When my next novel Sarabande is released this fall by Vanilla Heart Publishing, it will become my third novel set partially in Glacier National Park. Sarabande’s Glacier Park locations include Mt. Gould, the Angel Wing, Lake Josephine, Swiftcurrent Lake, Many Glacier Hotel, and Chief Mountain.

When the novel begins, my protagonist Sarabande has just finished spending the night on top of the Angel Wing. I’m sure the park service prohibits this practice, but then she lives in a look-alike universe that is accessed via several portals in the park. Her world is the 1970s. Our world, at the time the novel is set, is the 1980s.

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She has much to learn about our world, from electricity, to the existence of a major hotel sitting where there’s an empty space in her world, to cars and highways, and how to travel across country. The Many Glacier area, as I mention in my e-book Bears; Where they Fought: Life In Glacier Park’s Swiftcurrent Valley, is rich in history, trails and mountains to climb.

The popular valley is not only a draw for tourists, but is my favorite place in my favorite park. I can think of no better place for an adventure novel. We have the extremes of weather, of dangerous high places and the chances of meeting grizzly bears or moose or ospreys or wolverines.

I’m looking forward to the release of Sarabande for many reasons. It’s my long-promised sequel to The Sun Singer. It’s told from a female protagonist’s point of view—a first for me. And it gives me an excuse to write again about Glacier National Park. I have been posting about the heroine’s journey itself in my Sarabande’s Journey weblog. It’s been fun to explore the differences between the solar journey in The Sun Singer, which follows Joseph Campbell’s well-known series of mythic steps in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and the lunar journey which is quite different.

Lunar journeys are usually much darker and much for frightening because they focus on the lore of the night and the unconscious and, as we see in many myths, the domain of the underworld. Nevertheless, Sarabande is an adventure story with its primary scenes in a mountain world that park visitors know so well. The story also unfolds along U.S. Highway 2, the wetlands of northeast Montana’s prairie pothole region, and in Decatur, Illinois where Robert Adams, the Sun Singer lives.

As we get closer to the release date, I’ll begin posting excerpts of the book. It will appear first as an e-book on Amazon’s Kindle and in the other formats available at the smashwords.com site. A bit later, it will also be available as a paperback. If you’re a fan of Glacier National Park, I hope you will enjoy both the story and the location.